On November 25, 1915, Einstein published the field equations of gravity, which are the heart of general relativity. He revolutionised the world's understanding of gravity and laid the groundwork for many subsequent scientific and technological breakthroughs. According to American space agency NASA, Einstein proposed that gravity operated less as a force and more as a field that distorted space and time around massive objects, in contrast to Isaac Newton's conception of gravity as a force transmitted instantaneously over distances.
General relativity has been subjected to numerous observational tests over the years, and now a new study published in Nature Astronomy has put Einstein's theory to the ultimate test.
According to ScienceAlert, this theory may one day help resolve some of the biggest mysteries in cosmology, and the results hint that the theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked on this scale.
According to Einstein, the vacuum energy has a repulsive gravity - it pushes the empty space apart. Interestingly, in 1998, it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is in fact accelerating (a finding awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics). However, the amount of vacuum energy, or "dark energy," as it has been called, necessary to explain the acceleration is many orders of magnitude smaller than what quantum theory predicts, reported The Conversation.
As per ScienceAlert, the study has demonstrated that it is possible to test the validity of general relativity over cosmological distances using observational data. While scientists haven't yet solved the Hubble problem, they will have a lot more data from new probes in a few years.
This means that researchers will be able to use these statistical methods to continue tweaking general relativity, explore the limits of modifications, and pave the way to resolving some of the open challenges in cosmology.
